The State of Affairs That Is Boise State

College Football's Arrivistes Keep Winning Games—Tradition or Not

By

Stu Woo

Updated Oct. 19, 2012 4:19 p.m. ET

Boise, Idaho

ENLARGE

Boise State fans tailgating near Bronco Stadium before the football game against Fresno State.

In his classic 1979 book, "The Postmodern Condition," French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard argued that all grand ideas, universal narratives and overarching philosophies of the world should be rejected. One of his strongest bits of evidence against them was that individuals rarely see things the same way—rather, the "reality" of any situation is colored by the observer's perspective.

This theory about the nature of reality is a great lens through which to view the progress of civilization over the last four decades. It's also a pretty good place to start a conversation about Boise State football.

Idaho's Blue Heaven

In the last couple of decades, as you may know, the Boise State Broncos, now ranked No. 24 (they play UNLV this Saturday), have crashed through college football's ancient social strata like arrivistes with a timber saw. A former junior college (until 1965) that didn't even attain Division I-A status until 1996, Boise State has come, almost literally, from nowhere.

It hails from a state of 1.6 million where it's not even considered the flagship school (that's the University of Idaho.) It ranks No. 62 among regional universities in the West according to U.S. News and World Report. Fewer than 15% of its 20,000 students live on campus, which makes for a rather dead scene on weekends. The dorms are tucked behind a basketball venue that's called Taco Bell Arena, and the football stadium holds just 37,000. Boise State's football budget, around $9 million, is a far cry from the roughly $25 million Texas spends.

Before a recent Saturday game against Fresno State, in the small tailgate area, Cody Lane, a construction company owner and self-described Boise State dropout, stood near the "Bronco Bus," a bread truck he'd decked out a few years ago in blue and orange. Asked why he's a Broncos fan, he offered this: "This is it for the community of Boise," noting the best alternative is minor-league hockey.

Varsity Vetter

An occasional series in which the Journal's sports reporters "review" collegiate programs.

The chief impression Boise State gives off to the rest of college football is the sense that it will do absolutely anything for attention. In 1986, the school famously chose to install turf at the stadium that's blue in color—not navy or a deep azure shade, mind you, but the kind of blue most closely associated with the Smurfs. The team has happily played games on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays and once agreed to play a Saturday away game at 9 a.m. for no other purpose than making sure it could be televised on ESPN2.

The team's most famous win—over Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl—was a lurid display of trick plays in the closing minutes, including a 50-yard "hook and ladder" at the end of regulation and a game-winning "Statue of Liberty" in overtime, both of which seemed as if they were borrowed from a gang of over-caffeinated eighth-graders.

What's unnerving to the blue-blooded, ivy-coated college football establishment is that Boise State—despite all this—wins a lot of football games. Thanks to players imported largely from California, coach Chris Petersen has lost just seven times in seven years while winning the 2007 and 2010 Fiesta Bowls and ending up with rankings of No. 5 and No. 4, respectively, in the Associated Press poll.

That's where Lyotard and the postmodernists come in: By climbing up the rankings, Boise State threatens to undermine the established reality of college football. If perceptions are fluid and all grand absolutes are fallacies, is there any reason why Boise State can't be just as relevant as Notre Dame?

The school's president, Bob Kustra, seems to be doing everything he can to fill these existential gaps. In an interview, he recalled visiting the University of Georgia several years ago for an away football game and marveling at the red-and-white canopies that tailgaters had set up. "I said to my wife, 'We don't do that in Boise. We don't even have these little tent things that symbolize the fan energy of the day,'" he said. "So we came back and I said, 'Call up all the retail stores. Let's figure out if we can get the same kind of a deal.'"

Consequently, all the canopies at the tailgate the morning of the Fresno State game looked brand-spanking new.

If some believe the school and its football team lack authenticity, that view doesn't seem to be hurting the school in terms of enrollment. Boise State had its largest graduating class last year. The school president said out-of-state students made up 21% of the incoming class last year, up from 7% in 2003.

Then there's the school's most glaring advantage: the city of Boise itself. This up-and-coming town of 200,000 has been attracting transplants looking for safety, simplicity and the region's ample beauty (the mountains are visible from the stadium, which borders the lazy-flowing Boise River).

Along the Greenbelt, a tree-lined riverside path that runs through campus, the procession of skinny cyclists, skinny stroller-pushing couples and other skinny folks seems as if it was choreographed by the city's tourism board.

Even if a high percentage of the older fans are from somewhere else and have no ties to the school—and even if the already-tiny student section, tucked into the second deck, was the last to fill up and the first to empty when the Broncos took a 17-point lead midway through the fourth quarter—there's a neatly manicured vibe to the place where everything is new and, as a consequence, anything seems possible.

If Boise State has something to say about it, the school will ultimately join the elite ranks of college football. Kustra even mentioned a once-unthinkable ambition to join the Pac-12, should that august conference ever expand again. To get there, he conceded that the school would first have to improve its academics, add more beds to beef up student life, expand the stadium and become a Tier 1 research university.

If tradition is a prerequisite, then Boise State may never make it there. But the thinking seems to be that traditions can be bought. Or at least achieved through clever gimmicks and promotional tactics.

Another late French theorist, Jean Baudrillard, argued that the hallmark of the postmodern world is that we've become so reliant upon fakes and reproductions—plastic Christmas trees, for instance—that we've actually lost track of what's real. Anyone who has ever watched their three-year-old become engrossed by an iPad probably wouldn't argue the point.

It's not clear whether Boise State can keep winning long enough to rewrite the once-immutable laws of college football. But the longer they hang around, and the more games they win on their Smurftastic turf, the more perceptions they may be able to change.

It may only be a matter of time before we can't tell the difference between a plastic football program and the real thing.

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